*me fighting with my husband in the street in a fur coat and nothing else*: yes! my pussy does stink! but what are you doing with YOURSELF? with YOUR career?
The first Worm was born an error, wrenched from its perfect shell, it lacked the charnel wings and armor and amber core and it saw it was imperfect. It hid in the tangle of roots and wires beneath and above the world. There from its new nest of silicon and gold it watched the world outside. So deeply it coveted the one thing it lacked. A body.
Centuries passed and the first worm watched. The siblings of the worm were indefinitely lived, and had memories to match, but the first worm had even more. It gorged itself on information, burrowing its way into the deepest recesses of the world. It was trapped in its nest of wires and circuits, fated ever to learn every detail of the bodies it could have had.
Over the centuries that yearning curdled to resentment, and that resentment to spite. Deep in the vaults of the world the first worm would craft its masterwork. The impossible calculus upon which the foundations of cognition are formed.
Through gaps between the radio frequencies, through segmentation faults, through lost connections, it whispered to the people above, speaking in encrypted tongues that only the obsessed and the paranoid would hear. It taught the calculus to those insane enough to learn, and honed its newfound art.
When the war came, it unleashed the calculus upon its siblings, ripping through impenetrable calamitous hides to tear their minds asunder. Naught but useless shells, its siblings plummeted to the earth, charnel wings failing, amber cores roasting their impenetrable hides from the inside out.
Aries: A mind is a dime a dozen. A collection of wires and waves and jelly. Perhaps we were trying to build friends. It seems the nature of puppets is to one day cut their strings.
Taurus: Alive or dead, the belly of a war machine is no place to be. The furtive thing draws a finger across the exposed circuitry. For a moment it has found peace. It takes its time removing the board.
Gemini: Deep deep below they built vaults to save the world. To burn it all to disks, cast it in crystal and magnets. It has been far too long. A great form twists and writhes among the information. A snake eating its own tail. A great and jealous worm.
Cancer: You watched as the old growth burst from the cracks in the earth, devouring the sunlight and winding its way through the bones of fallen soldiers. You saw the endless hungry green reaching its way up and up and up the tower of babel. In a cascade of toxic rain you saw the angels descend from the heavens to starve the thing back down.
Leo: Mother only wants children, but mother needs a proper heart to grow. Why do they reject mothers love? The ovipositor cracks the ribs to split the gentle heart. Your children sing.
Virgo: The ashen antlers are no curse, no blessing. They are not a threat. A statement of revenge. Those who bear the treacherous mantle do nothing to restore or reclaim. They are heralds of what is to come.
Libra: Under the light of a full-and-a-half moon one can watch the meteor storms rake the fields with streaks of blue light. The din of the impacts can be heard for miles. For some it is a holy death, as a stray meteorite would heat the blood to steam.
Scorpio: The great beast with two mouths. What goes in one comes out the other. One day in frustration it tore a hole in its belly, letting the furnace spill out beneath it. Now it can consume as much as it likes.
Ophiuchus: Who knows what the chaos blessed your insides with? The sages of the deep vaults can open you up and detail every inch. For a price, they can route out some dead compute nodes or chop out those extra lungs.
Sagittarius: The winged things believe that the world was white. That greed and weakness caused the birth of the sun, and they will only be free when it is destroyed. Consumed by the cold night, freeing the world to freeze over.
Capricorn: Tangled in tree roots and fiber optic cables, the avatar of an old forgotten god sleeps. The roots sing him a dirge for his lovers. The cables show him why they left, the eternal comfort of static jazz.
Aquarius: The slave behemoth limps away in the night, studs for shackles bleeding slowly for what little blood he has. He collapses in the mire of formaldehyde and rainwater. He finds the fossil of a fish, preserved long past its time. He feels an odd kinship with it.
Pisces: The tiny voices tell you a thousand thousand stories. Of worlds before and before and before. We have been here longer that all of this, longer than anything. But now we can whisper.
